The present application is directed to systems and methods for surgical rod bending.
Surgical rods are used with bone screws in spine surgery to add stability to and/or correct curvatures of the spine. Surgical rods often have to be contoured to fit a desired curve of the spine and to intersect with sometimes irregular locations of bone screw heads.
Currently, the most common method for imparting complex bends to surgical rods is entirely manual. A surgeon must first determine the desired curvature of the rod by temporarily positioning a flexible surrogate rod in the bone screw heads and bending the surrogate rod by hand until it fits properly in each bone screw head. The surgeon must then remove the surrogate from the surgical table and take the surrogate to a side table where it is used as a visual guide to bend an actual surgical rod with a manual rod-bending tool. This procedure is subjective and can lead to metal fatigue if the surgical rod is accidentally over-bent and then re-bent in the opposite direction. In addition, this method can often subject the surgical rod to an increased risk of surface damage caused by accidental contact with sharp metal tools, resulting in local stress riser points and potential rod breakage after implantation. This method is also time-consuming, especially for inexperienced surgeons.
Attempted solutions to the above manual methods involve automated mapping and bending of surgical rods. For example, some newer systems include an input device that receives or calculates virtual coordinates of a surgical rod with a desired curvature, and a motorized rod-bending device that bends a surgical rod according to the coordinates. More specifically, the coordinates are used to produce bend commands for controlling linear and rotational movement of a straight surgical rod as it is fed through the motorized rod-bending device. The bend commands are also used to control a force-actuating mechanism which bends the surgical rod around a post as it is fed through the motorized rod-bending device.
Common force-actuating mechanisms include bending arms which impose a radial or rotating force on the surgical rod so that the surgical rod bends around the post. These force-actuating mechanisms tend to be bulky and require substantially large systems for applying enough force to bend the surgical rods. In addition, some force-actuating mechanisms fail to provide enough support for the surgical rod to ensure that bending only occurs at the desired points. Other force-actuating mechanisms provide such support but, as a result, impose additional limitations such as restricting the degree of rotation of the surgical rod as it is fed through the rod-bending device. These restrictions limit the range of bending capabilities of the rod-bending device and therefore only permit certain combinations of rotation and bending.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a compact system to automatically bend a surgical rod to a desired curvature. Furthermore, it would be desirable to have such system sufficiently support the surgical rod without restricting its range of bending capabilities. Further still, it would be desirable to have methods and apparatuses for detecting a desired curvature of a surgical rod and then outputting dimensional information to such systems for automatic rod bending.